The Puerto Rican Literature Project

The abandoned house cries of hidden pain.

It seems like its owners aren’t coming back.

The languor of a plant in the plot begs

for the soft caress of a woman’s hand....

Memories drift in uncertain shadows.

Murmuring about, the dead leaves flutter.

The green lemon tree rhymes forgotten tones

and it weeps flowers, its greenness withers.

They all left. All of them. The dog remains.

He’s lying on the ground next to the door.

At last, too late, in this world at long last

I’ve found a brother I was looking for.... [1]

[1]  

Hernández’s original poem is written in alejandrinos (Alexandrine lines, which in Spanish have 14 syllables). To render some of the elegant musicality of the alejandrinos, I used a loose pentameter which becomes a bit more iambic toward the end. Since the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme in the original, I rhymed them in the last stanza (“door” and “for”), and I also played with off rhyme and assonance (“flutter” and “withers”). One of the hardest elements to translate here is the deliberate use of stuffy and even archaic words to evoke the atmosphere of an old, abandoned house: Hernández uses “languor” (instead of the more common “languidez”) to mean languor and “lacrima” (instead of the more common “llora”) to mean cries or sheds a tear. To render this, in a few places I used formal phrasing and diction (“murmuring about”), but I mostly focused on letting the music of language create atmosphere.